Category: Team

Organizations of all sizes continue to embrace Agile and DevOps. Some firms might adopt one or the other methodology, while others combine the two in the hopes of improving their chances at success. Whatever the approach, there’s no denying that leveraging the Cloud makes adoption an easier process.

If your company is new to either Agile or DevOps, or are looking at ways to make the practice of both more efficient, here are a few insights on how the Cloud helps. Watch your team build and deploy great applications faster than ever before. Good luck!

The Cloud helps Agile and DevOps in a Myriad of Ways

An article by Leon Tranter for Extreme Uncertainty covers the different ways Cloud services make implementing Agile or DevOps a relative breeze. Maybe your organization is currently using the Cloud for a portion of its development operations? If so, you are already one step closer to a successful Agile adoption.

Of course, the Cloud facilitates the virtualized environments used for development, QA, and production. Using a virtual container application, like Docker, is essentially an industry standard in software engineering. In this case, the Cloud helps organizations achieve the velocity required for success in DevOps, eventually reaching the Holy Grails of continuous integration or delivery.

As Tranter notes, smaller businesses embracing either Agile or DevOps as part of a Lean startup approach especially benefit from the Cloud. Lower expenses combined with a faster entry to market make the Cloud a winner for many tech startups. It allows the SMB to truly take advantage of their agility.

A Cloud-based IDE?

The Cloud also facilitates the actual process of writing and storing code, especially collaboration in a distributed fashion. This fact largely contributed to Microsoft’s recent decision to purchase GitHub. In essence it gives Redmond a better chance of competing with Amazon’s industry-leading AWS Cloud service.

But what about an actual Cloud-hosted IDE – essentially an IDE as a Service (IDEaaS)? Tranter commented on the emergence of some IDEs offered using the SaaS model. This offers many advantages to startups or existing organizations hoping for the extra efficiency for a successful DevOps adoption.

The Cloud-based IDEs tend to be simpler than their fully-fledged brethren like Visual Studio or Eclipse. Organizations – no matter their size – need to weigh the functionality factor versus the cost savings gained through the Cloud option. Companies developing complex applications may still find a desktop IDE to be a better choice.

General Business Productivity Applications

On the other hand, the Cloud makes perfect sense for the office productivity applications used by any development shop. Choosing Google Docs over the Microsoft Office suite simply saves more money even with the latter option now being provided online. Examples from Application Performance Monitoring software to HR and payroll applications are now available as a SaaS offering.

The bottom line is simple. Any company – startup or enterprise – considering an investment in Agile or DevOps needs to look at leveraging the myriad of Cloud-based tools. The efficiencies and cost savings help earn a faster return on investment, not to mention an improved ability to thrive in a competitive business landscape.

Thanks for reading the Betica Blog. Stay tuned for additional insights from an evolving software development world.

By far the dominant story from this week in the software development world involves Microsoft’s buyout of the source control giants, GitHub. In fact, we just talked about GitHub’s positive impact on the application engineering process in May’s news digest. Of course, this news spawned a lot of discussion and controversy within the developer community.

Let’s take a closer look at Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub with an eye on the reasons behind the acquisition as well as what it means for your app engineering shop. Is a new era in software development now upon us? Will it change how your team manages its source code?

The Details behind the Microsoft/GitHub Purchase

Microsoft buying GitHub isn’t just another example of Redmond crushing a competitor. Burning venture capital at a high rate over the past few years made GitHub a ripe target for acquisition. The giants in the industry, namely Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, all considered a purchase of the code-sharing organization.

According to an article in CNBC, GitHub preferred Microsoft due to the relationship between their founder, Chris Wanstrath, and Redmond CEO, Satya Nadella. Paying $7.5 billion meant MS paid nearly 25 times GitHub’s revenue, to use a stock analyst metric. Microsoft gains the benefit of a popular Cloud-based service for its Azure offering; part of its strategy to compete with Amazon AWS in the industry.

GitHub also pairs nicely with LinkedIn in the Redmond portfolio. It gives Microsoft access to a large number of software engineering and general technology professionals. The expectation is for GitHub to continue to operate in a largely independent fashion with the exception of a migration to Azure.

Is this the End of the Open Source GitHub?

As we discussed last week, GitHub provides a great example of the positive influence of open source on the software development world. Back in the Steve Ballmer era, Microsoft earned a reputation as an enemy of open source software. “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches,” said the MS CEO back in 2001.

Much of the gnashing and trashing in the developer community about a Microsoft-owned GitHub is a reflection of Redmond at the turn of the century. The Nadella-led company, on the other hand, is more of a champion of open source. The Visual Studio Code and .NET Core initiatives are examples of this new progressive attitude at Microsoft.

One of Nadella’s strategic goals involves fostering a developer-centric focus, or even emphasizing the one that already existed at Microsoft. GitHub fits perfectly with these plans. In fact, Microsoft closing its own competitor to the service – Codeplex – last year hinted at this week’s purchase. The added benefit of boosting Azure’s chances against AWS in the Cloud wars likely clinched their purchase decision.

Ultimately, when compared to Google or Amazon, Microsoft is arguably the better choice for GitHub. This especially rings true considering the company’s developer focus, as well as the embracing of open source under Satya Nadella. Nonetheless, every development shop currently using the source code service needs to consider whether staying makes sense for the long term.

Thanks for reading this edition of the Betica Blog. Stay tuned for additional dispatches from the never boring world of software development.

Welcome to the May edition of the software development news digest here at the Betica Blog. We regularly take a look at some interesting stories influencing the application engineering world. Hopefully, they provide a measure of insight to help your own coding projects.

If you are interested in checking out last month’s digest, simply click on the following link. We cover an AI routine that knows how to code. As always, thanks for reading!

GitHub imagining the Future of Collaborative Software Development

The ubiquitous source code repository giant, GitHub, naturally lies at the center of most software development shops’ workflow. This gives the organization a unique ability to influence the overall engineering process across the industry. Collaborative development is one such natural area given the organization’s distributed source control system. An article about GitHub’s importance appeared this week at The Next Web.

A collaborative spirit existed at GitHub from the beginning. The company released a public API for its source control application soon after going live. The software teams behind Ruby on Rails and Bitcoin leveraged it for source control as well as an example of the power of team development.

Ultimately, these two facts highlight the reason the open source movement is so influential throughout the tech industry. Since GitHub is essentially the standard for source code control, it played a large role in transitioning coding from a solitary task to something more social and interactive.Aaron Upright noted as much in his article for The Next Web.

“Contrasted with alternatives like GitLab and BitBucket, GitHub has taken a best-of-breed approach. It’s essentially created a platform from which it’s possible integrate the products and tools that are better than what it feels it can create. It’s not building chat tools or CI functionality or project management on its own; instead, it makes it easy to integrate Slack, or Circle CI, or whatever else you might want,” commented Upright.

In short, GitHub makes it easy to collaborate when coding; setting an example for – as well as influencing – the rest of the industry.

Oracle finally to remove Java Serialization Security Hole

Serialization is one of the most important functions in software development, allowing data objects to be easily distributed as byte streams. Unfortunately, Java’s serialization routines, in place for decades, create a security hole easily exploited by nefarious agents. Oracle recently announced they plan to remove serialization from future versions of Java. News about the change appeared this week in InfoWorld.

The company plans on an approach allowing developers to use their own serialization engine. It interacts with a small framework included in a future version of the “platform once records” – Java’s nomenclature for data classes. It is expected to support JSON and XML as well as other formats.

Oracle feels they made a massive mistake with the current version of serialization implemented in 1997. They noted that nearly one-half of all Java security vulnerabilities are because of this engine. The company recently added a way to filter the classes being serialized as one way to mitigate the risk before the new serialization framework gets introduced.

Oracle provided no information on which upcoming version of Java is slated to include the reengineered serialization framework. Stay tuned!

That’s it for this month’s news digest. Keep coming back for additional software development insights from the Betica Blog.